


Your extra time (and your kiss)

by destinyofshipwreck



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-09
Updated: 2019-01-09
Packaged: 2019-10-07 02:04:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17356871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/destinyofshipwreck/pseuds/destinyofshipwreck
Summary: "Gotta fuck grief too, eh," he says, and she can tell he's finally on the verge of a laugh."Grief sex is a real phenomenon," she says, matter-of-factly."They teach you that at psychology school?" he says."Picked it up in independent study," she says.//Two pizzas over three weeks, spring 2017.





	Your extra time (and your kiss)

Tessa would have been welcome to come to the funeral, of course she would have been, but she only sends her condolences with floral arrangements to the house and the church instead and puts a note in her calendar to make a followup phone call in a week, sensing that it might be some kind of intrusion if she invited herself along.

She does, however, drive out to meet Scott at the airport after his Sunday evening flight back from London.

"Oh," he says, visibly surprised to see her on the concourse. "You're here."

"Didn't think you should have to take a cab," she says with a shrug, taking the garment bag folded over his arm. "Did you check a bag?"

"Yeah, just gym clothes and skates," he says.

"You sit, I'll grab it," she says.

The flight must have been half empty because the concourse is nearly deserted, only a handful of people waiting next to the luggage carousel. Scott's battered duffel with the Team Canada tag is nearly the first one off the ramp. She hauls it to where he's sitting, next to the door by the taxi stand, and waves him off when he moves to take it from her.

"My car's close," she says. He's evidently too worn out to disagree with her, and trails her there in silence that remains unbroken until she hits the freeway and turns on Radio 2.

"So," she says halfway back into town. "I figured, if you insist, I could drop you off at home. Or, come to my place instead, and I'll buy you a pizza."

"I've got laundry," he says.

"After midnight?" she says. "Do laundry at my place, where there's pizza."

"You think I shouldn't be alone," he says.

"Not unless you really want to be," she says.

"You drive a hard bargain," he says. "But I accept."

The laundry excuse is forgotten as soon as Scott's inside and settled on her chesterfield in front of the gas fireplace. With pizza on its way—pepperoni, onions, green peppers, extra olives—she curls up next to him there, pressing herself against his side. He lets her take his hand in her own and trace the lines on his palm and then weave her fingers together with his, and she's pleased to feel his breathing slow. Only the staticky buzz of the doorbell breaks the spell.

"You bought me pizza so I'd feel too guilty to not eat it," he says in a faux accusatory tone, when she brings him a plate and a bottle of a cloudy Hefeweizen she'd picked up thinking of him a few weeks ago and had been saving for a rainy day. "You conniving fraud."

"You won't be any less sad if you're starving," she says. "Gotta feed grief. I'm not wrong."

"You're not," he says.

Afterward, he heaves himself off the chesterfield to wash their plates and stash the leftover quarter of the pizza in her fridge, then looks back at the chesterfield, then her, a half-formed question in his eyes.

"I'm not kicking you out and you're not sleeping on the sofa," she says.

He raises one eyebrow. "That's a little forward."

"I mean it that you shouldn't have to be alone," she says.

"Wouldn't want to be an ungracious guest," he says with a shrug, and not quite a smile.

He digs through his duffel for a pair of sweats and an old Leafs t-shirt to change into and meets her in bed a few minutes later, where she draws him into her arms and leans down to kiss him for the first time since he arrived, lightly, wherever she can reach, his forehead and his cheek, and the back of his hand. He exhales softly when she moves the hand to her breast, curving it around the underside to cup it in his palm, arching her back when he strokes her through the thin fabric of her camisole.

"Gotta fuck grief too, eh," he says, and she can tell he's finally on the verge of a laugh.

"Grief sex is a real phenomenon," she says, matter-of-factly.

"They teach you that at psychology school?" he says.

"Picked it up in independent study," she says.

He cranes his neck to kiss her back when she leans into him again, and this time she feels his lips curl into a smile before they part for her tongue.

He touches her like he doesn't quite remember what she likes, or like she's unfamiliar territory through which he's charting a course for the first time: nipples first, like they aren't too sensitive until she's ready to be overwhelmed; a tentative finger and then a second slid inside her like she doesn't prefer to be warmed up with his fingertips on her clit first, like she doesn't prefer to be swollen and spilling out onto the sheets before he's inside her. It's off-kilter enough that she gently lifts his hand off her by the wrist and slides down his body herself, crouched over his knees, and takes his cock in her fist, then her mouth, a fraction of an inch at a time, lapping the underside with her tongue, smearing her saliva the whole length of him.

Tessa likes the word  _cock_  to describe him. Likes that she can't pronounce it through gritted teeth, likes that it necessitates parted lips, likes that the vowel sound and consonants both spring forward from the back of her hard palate. Scott doesn't use any words to describe himself except  _yes_ when she has the tip of him where she wants him, right where she would form the word  _cock_ , if she could speak around him in her mouth.

She thinks she must feel his building orgasm almost before he does, because it seems to take him by surprise, and he comes on her tongue with a strangled sound close to a sob and both hands clenched into fists at his sides.

He tugs her into his arms with some urgency and kisses her hard before she has a chance to wipe his come off her lips, and when he cups his hand over her cunt again she's almost as wet as she would have been given what she wanted, almost as ready for his fingers. He wrenches one orgasm out of her with three of them crooked inside her and his teeth on her breast, and when she's caught her breath he strokes her softly toward another, almost too slick with want for the friction she needs.

She adjusts his grip for him: three fingers inside her, the heel of his hand on her clit, and yields to the pressure of bearing down against him. He watches her come, like she’s not shy about it and doesn’t prefer to whimper or gasp into his mouth like it's a secret between them, but as she slumps back against the headboard she finds herself unable to object; she loves to watch him, too.

When she gets up, he doesn't follow her into the shower as he usually does. She doesn't remark on it, just piles her hair into a knot on top of her head and scrubs the sweat off briskly to save hot water for him, and gives him space afterward, putting the kettle on for camomile tea for both of them while he's in the shower alone.

"Damn," comes his voice from the bathroom after she hears the water shut off. "Tess, do you have any—I thought I had some but must've left it at my folks', the really thick moisturizer, the one in the blue tin?"

"We're adults now, remember, with real incomes," she says, stepping behind him at the vanity and wrapping one arm around his waist, just above where he's wrapped a bath sheet. "Here."

Instead of the ziploc bag of toiletries he usually travels with, on the countertop in front of him is a worn dopp kit, the leather waterstained and creased, like it's decades old, like it could have belonged to his grandfather. Its contents are scattered next to it, a few cartridge razors and toothpaste and mouthwash, moisturizer not among them.

From the medicine cabinet she pulls a tube of lanolin—his lips are deep red, chapped nearly raw from the cold dry air at the rink—and a pot of magic cream, and applies them to his face herself with her fingertips, watching them both in the mirror. His stubble is coarse, his cheekbones weatherbeaten and rougher than they look, the skin at his temples smooth as silk satin.

"Ah," he says once she's finished, assessing his complexion with mock admiration. "Whence your divine glow."

"Stick with me, kid," she says, and plants a kiss between his shoulder blades.

When she drifts off it's with her chilly feet pressed between his warm calves, the hair at the nape of his neck tickling her forehead, and her arm draped across his ribs, her hand resting over his heart.

She wakes up again after only a short time—the clock by the bedside showing there's hours still until her phone's alarm at 8:00am—and finds that Scott's awake too, staring at the ceiling. He starts when she reaches for his hand, but relaxes when she pulls him close so he can rest his head on her chest.

"I'm telling everyone," he mumbles drowsily against her collarbone. "That you're a rock for me."

"You don't have to," she says, stroking his hair.

"I never was for you," he says. "But you are, and everyone needs to know, that—"

"You're exhausted," she says. "And you're repeating yourself, and no one needs to know anything, not now, anyway, not when the script is—"

"The most solid our team has ever been," he says in unison with her. He's rolled half away from her, eyes closed, hair mussed, flat on his back, but he nipped her lightly before he did it, and she can feel the tiny bruise beginning to bloom under her skin, right at the edge of where any of her v-neck leotards would hit.

He comments on it himself in the morning over breakfast: black coffee, granola, two poached eggs, three fistfuls of frozen berries from a bag in the freezer in a smoothie with coconut yogurt and three scoops of the protein isolate that's shipped to her condo every other week.

"Nice hickey, Virtch," he says.

"Got it off some guy I met in an airport last night," she says. "Right on the collarbone, for God and the public to see."

"Dealer's choice, I figured," he says. "You know, you have the v-necks if you want, and then the one that's cut higher so it won't show, and your warmup jackets, so."

"A man with a plan," she says.

"A man with a style blog," he says. "The many practice outfits of Tessa Virtue, I update it every week."

"You'd never. And I can't believe the word 'blog' came out of your mouth," she says.

"For the first and last time," he says, pouring her more coffee.

"In this, if you don't mind," she says, and pushes her ceramic travel mug across the table toward him. "We gotta go if we're not gonna be late."

He leads her to his own car, parked a few blocks away on the street in front of his building, not to hers in the back lane, and she's a little surprised at herself for following him, but she does, coffee in hand, and her skate bag with both of their gear in it slung over his shoulder.

"This was really nice," he says, most of the way to the rink. "It felt normal."

"Yeah?" she says. "I'm a world-class hostess and 'normal' is all you've got?"

"Normal," he repeats, but with a grin this time. "Reassuring, I mean. Stable. Thanks, for—"

"For access to my Charlotte Tilbury stash, sure," she says, grinning back.

At the rink she picks a v-neck leotard after all, and makes sure he sees her in it before she pulls a cropped sweatshirt with a high neck over top, covering her nearly to her chin.

"I wasn't just exhausted," he says to her a few weeks later, between sets in the weight room. She almost doesn't hear him over her own heaving breaths and the Janet Jackson song blaring from the stereo.

"What's that," she says.

"When I said that I was never strong for you like you're strong for me," he says. "I thought about it, and I meant it."

"We went over this with JF," she says. "I'm not—there's no grudge, I don't think you need to be forgiven for anything."

"I know," he says. "It's still true, though."

The door opens and a crowd of their colleagues enter. The timing could not have been better to avert an argument. Scott only helps her to her feet and tosses her a medicine ball instead of saying anything more.

He's waiting for her in the foyer when she emerges from the locker room, hair still damp from the shower.

"Sorry to have ambushed you," he says, and shuffles his feet awkwardly. "All I meant was, thanks for looking out for me, and can I buy you a pizza."

"I knew the guilt of accepting a favour would weigh on you 'til you got me back," she says. "Your place or mine?"

"Furnace is out at mine," he says.

"Always an ulterior motive," she says. The spring has been unseasonably cool, not yet warm enough even to leave the bedroom window cracked overnight. "I've got errands, but you can meet me there at eight?"

At a quarter past, Scott lets himself upstairs with the key she'd given him the day she moved in, and opens her front door with a box from the Neapolitan pizza place balanced in one hand, a bottle of Tempranillo under his arm.

"Pulling out all the stops, eh," she says, taking both while he fumbles with his shoes.

They eat on the chesterfield again, the small kitchen table being occupied by a haphazard sheaf of file folders and a laptop. The pizza is piled high with feta and mushrooms Scott must've paid a fortune for, oysters and morels fried in butter, and the wine is young and tart, and her feet are warm under the blanket draped over his lap.

She turns to sit upright when they've finished off a pizza, and Scott takes her glass to refill it, but kisses her first, gently, on the mouth. He tastes like mushrooms and the wine, earthy with an astringent bite.

Turning to set the glass on the endtable, she clambers astride him and kisses him again, harder, the blanket falling to the floor.

"If you were anyone else I'd call this a date," he says softly, winding her hair around his fingers.

"No reason we have to call it anything," she murmurs. "We're here, aren't we."

"You're always here for me," he whispers, and lifts her off his lap, setting her down where he'd sat, and sinking to his knees on the floor in front of her. She shucks off her leggings and underwear, and he whimpers when he breathes her in.

Tessa likes the word  _cunt_  to describe her own body. Likes that she can still pronounce it with a clenched jaw, likes the weight of it in the centre of her mouth, likes how the flick of her tongue behind her teeth reminds her of tasting other cunts she's known, Tanith's, Anna's. Scott likes  _pussy_ , but he only ever breathes it to her in the tone of desperation to which its sibilance lends itself, and only ever bookending a sentence that begins with a matching bilabial stop,  _please_.

He does remember how she likes to be eaten out: slowly, staving off her orgasm for as long as possible until the force of it overpowers her, and not as a prelude to anything else. With his tongue tracing the perimeter of her cunt and his fingers inside her as deep as he can reach, she loses track of time completely, and of how many times he pushes her up against the knife edge of her orgasm only to draw back from it.

She slides off the chesterfield herself when she's spent to sprawl on the floor next to him, which finally elicits a chuckle, the first one in weeks.

"Tough day?" he asks, and kisses the tip of her nose.

"Plyos kick my ass every time," she says, catching the underside of his jaw with her palm and tilting his head toward her to taste herself on his lips. The tannic bitterness of the wine still on his breath is headier now with the tang of her cunt and her sweat.

"Scott," she says. "If you picked morels and a young wine because you were thinking about eating me out while you were standing in the takeout line—"

"No reason dinner shouldn't complement dessert," he says with a wink.

"You're lucky this isn't a date, because if it were, I'd slap you," she says, slouching back against the chesterfield and stretching out her legs.

He ruffles her hair and then shifts to sit cross-legged at her feet, taking one calf and then the other in his hands and massaging out the knots with sure strokes.

"It's not that you think I owe you something," he says a few minutes later.

"Hmm?" she says.

"You don't want to move in with me, or anything, but it's not because you resent me," he says.

"Yeah," she says. "It's more like—we have so much on our plate right now, and I just want to live in every moment that we can, and not worry about what anything means, or what's next for it."

"Put it on Pinterest," he says.

"Real inspirational for all the commitment-phobes on the world wide web," she says.

"I'm sorry," he says suddenly, letting go of her calf. "For thinking you resent me, or talking to you like you're withholding forgiveness from me, or, like—"

"Nah," she says. "You beat yourself up when you're stressed with whatever's handiest. I don't blame you, I just don't agree with you, is all."

"You're better at therapy than me," he says.

"Yeah, like I am at everything," she says.

She yawns hugely and rubs at her neck. When she opens her eyes again, Scott looks a little sheepish, like he's thinking about making a quick getaway.

"You're still not sleeping on the sofa," she says. "But you're gonna need to carry me to the bedroom, I think, or else I'll have to."

"They really did kick your ass, huh," he says, and his expression is finally relaxed, if only temporarily.

In the morning she'll slip out of bed before the alarm to wake him with coffee, and in the evening he'll massage the tension out of the back of her neck, and on and on, and no moment need bear any more meaning than that.


End file.
